I Read Jessica Calarco's Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net

Those of you who have been following me on the socials for awhile are probably familiar with what I call my “crank theory of everything.” I refer to it that way in jest in part because I have neither the background or requisite knowledge to be coming up with theories of anything, and in part because I want to evade the responsibility of having a coherent definition for something I have noticed in a lot of different situations, that nobody else seems to connect.

My basic theory, put into words the best my little accountant brain allows is something like this: the work that has traditionally been done by women is valuable and vital. The institutions that were developed to uphold liberalism (free markets, democracy, mythos and values) largely evolved with insufficient participation from women, so women and the labor they do were not incorporated into liberalism. Feminists fought the exclusion of women from liberal institutions, but did not incorporate the vital labor traditionally done by labor, so such work is still excluded from the liberal order, and people can fully participate in the liberal tradition only to the extent they do not perform this vital labor.

The labor I am referring to is largely child-rearing, but also includes care for the sick, elderly, and disabled, keeping family and community harmony, maintaining cultural traditions, etc. If you follow the assumptions of liberalism through to their conclusion, liberalism is an extravagant indulgence that people choose to pursue. When the conservatives claim that liberalism is simply not for women, who must be kept out of the market to do this labor at the discretion of their husband boss, liberalism just doesn’t have a compelling counter argument that will get these jobs done.

Within the liberal division, government programs have developed as a kludge to give women (it would be more precise to say “the people who due traditionally feminine labor” but that is a pain in the ass, so I am going to overgeneralize and say “women”) more access to liberalism’s fruits. The federal government’s big expenditures are for Medicaid, Medicare, and social security and state and local governments largely spend on schools—all programs for children, sick, elderly, and disabled that essentially allow people to do care labor for a wage, the way other labor is compensated in a liberal order.

This is a problem because this labor is invisible to the markets, which means the markets do not function. As an example, imagine I am trying to compare which country has the most efficient healthcare system. I see one country that manages to have substantially lower on book costs than the others, but the wait times for non-emergency procedures is much longer. I may decide that the low costs are worth it, but who is caring for the people awaiting for these procedures? Now another country holds per capita spending down through a more market approach where some people forego care because they either can’t or don’t want to pay full price for it. Again, who is taking care of these people through sickness and disability?

In both systems, mostly women will feel the obligations to put their hopes and ambitions and income on hold because a person in the family needs care. And policy makers are blind to those off book costs and can’t actually determine if costs are being saved instead of rendered invisible.

Additionally, since liberal compensation is not available for care labor, people in these roles often seek influence and power through illiberal means, which is a post for another day.

It would seem, then, that Calarco’s book would be right up my alley, and a lot of people had recommended it to me. I had sort of been avoiding it, because the subtitle annoyed me so much. “How Women Became America’s Safety Net.” as if safety nets were naturally occurring.

The book was based on research Calarco’s research project. She was interviewing pregnant women of diverse backgrounds in Indiana throughout their pregnancy and after birth. While she was conducting her research, the covid pandemic hit the country and as a lot of market labor was put on pause, care labor became more important than ever.

Calarco’s interview of so many different women painted a detailed portrait of the work that is so often rendered invisible. That alone makes the book a valuable read. And her work is definitely adjacent to my crank theory, but she doesn’t know about my theory and her muddled assumptions keep the book from being a good critique.

As the subtitle implies, at times she buys into the naturally occurring safety net theory. The book starts in WWII, noting the federal childcare system that was created in order to allow more mothers to do the manufacturing labor that the war effort desperately required. This program ended, and women left paid labor. Flash forward to day and women have become the safety net.

I was pretty disappointed in this analysis, because it makes this assumption that the problem of valuing women’s traditional labor under a liberal regime is easy. A quick government program and, presto! problem solved. While a less exploitative government supported childcare system would be a boon to children and families, in practice we know that there would be fights over wages and quality of care and vast discrepancies in the type of care that the children of the poor and wealthy received.

At other points in the book she seemed to buy into the liberal logic of care labor. Girls are socialized from a young age to be care takers and that is why they make the (implicitly) illogical decision to provide that care labor, and that socialization needs to stop. How we make sure that labor still gets done was left unexplored.

Her ultimate solution to the issue was to try to unionize motherhood, but that, too, seems destined to failure. Two women especially stuck out to me in the book. One was a religious conservative woman who planned to stay home with her child so that she could start doling out physical punishment in infancy, and planned to homeschool her children so that she could make sure to keep ‘em well beat. (remember what I said about illiberal power?) I hate her. The second women gave up a high power career to be a full time mother and brought her type A parenting home. While she seemed like a basically good person, in real life she would annoy the shit out of me, as I aim for adequacy at parenting. I can’t imagine coming together with all these women and setting some sort of parenting ground rules and regulations! Sounds like literal hell.

Ultimately, I also don’t have a solution for the problem of brining the valuable labor that mostly women have done historically on book, even while I think it is the vital issue of our time (or it was. Recovery from Trumpism may make this whole thing moot). It seems like everyone either takes women seriously but not markets or takes markets seriously but not women. My hope is that someone smart will eventually see what I see and run with it. Women’s labor is vital to a functioning society, and a liberalism that can’t properly incorporate that value is not a liberalism that can endure.